MAY: White House chose not to see threats

‘’Humans are great at self-delusion,” the philosopher Nassim Nicholas Taleb has observed. I’m confident he’d agree that the humans who populate the foreign policy community are no exception.

Two years ago, Osama bin Laden was killed on President Barack Obama’s orders. Before long, however, sophisticated analysts were declaring that this was not just a battle won — it was a war ended.

If bin Laden was dead, they asserted, rigor mortis also must have set in at al-Qaida. Nor could any serious threat continue to be posed by the supremacist, totalitarian ideology that al-Qaida was created to advance.

Among those most prominently writing and lecturing on al-Qaida’s “defeat” were retired Lt. Col. Thomas Lynch, a distinguished research fellow at the National Defense University, and Peter Bergen, a director of the New America Foundation, CNN national security analyst and producer of the first television interview with bin Laden in 1997.

‘’I’ve devoted 20 years of my life” to this problem, Bergen said. “I feel like a Sovietologist in 1989, and that’s a good feeling.”

I’m recounting this not to disparage Bergen, Lynch and other smart people whose bold analyses turned out, unfortunately, to be incorrect. What I do want to emphasize is that ideas matter. Which brings me t o the murders of Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens and three others in Benghazi. Much of the commentary has focused on the State Department’s characterization of the attack as “a response to inflammatory material posted on the Internet.”

We now know what actually happened: Self-proclaimed jihadists linked to al-Qaida planned and carried out an assault on the anniversary of al-Qaida’s attacks on America’s economic and political capitals. This has given rise to the suspicion that Obama, who was in the home stretch of his re-election campaign, and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, who was positioning herself for 2016, knew the truth but chose not to tell it.

But is it not also possible that Obama, Clinton and other officials actually did buy the al-Qaida-is-dead theory that Lynch, Bergen and others had proffered? The fact that this theory coincided with their interests would only have made it more persuasive. There are reasons why “humans are great at self-delusion.”

In his best-selling book, “The Black Swan,” Taleb endeavors to explain “everything we know about what we don’t know,” with particular emphasis on the impact of the unexpected. I suspect he’d say that those prematurely reporting the death of al-Qaida were confusing “absence of evidence” with “evidence of absence.” We had not suffered an attack on the scale of 9/11 in years. On that basis, they theorized that al-Qaida would never again be able to stage such an attack.

Taleb’s larger points are these: It is harder than it seems for anyone to predict the future because the most consequential variables are almost always unknown. We also know less about the past than we think — less about the causes and motivations that actually gave rise to the present.